Tim Whelan | It's a Boy / 1933

mouse into man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leslie Howard Gordon and John Paddy Carstairs (screenplay, based on the English adaptation by Austin Melford of the 1926 play by Franz Arnold and Ernst Bach, Huura, ein Junge), Tim Whelan (director) It's a Boy / 1933

 

What is far more important that the story of this truly silly farce is that the film established a character for the previous “mouse” (Horton’s own term for his early on-screen characterizations) or “sissy” which actor Edward Everett Horton—the star of this clumsy if often truly humorous vehicle It’s a Boy—had long been playing, creating a new persona of a slightly daffy, perpetually jittery, and generally confused heterosexual with perhaps even a slightly checkered past whose sole purpose in life was to support his best friend and maintain his marriage—although in this case the story simply concerns his attempt to get married.

      Horton’s new figure, his character in this case holding the moniker of Dudley Leake, allowed him not only to become the famed side-kick of Fred Astaire—playing Egbert in The Gay Divorcee (1934, the very year after this transformation), Horace Hardwick in Top Hat (1935), and Jeffrey Baird in Shall We Dance (1937)—but to survive the radical shift in the Film Production Code in which the homophobic, racist Joseph Breen banned all suggestions of queer behavior. Among the dozens of pansy performers of the early 1930s, including remarkable lead and character actors such as Horton, William Haines, Bobby Watson, Johnny Arthur, Tyrell Davis, Ramon Novarro, Franklin Pangborn, and numerous others, perhaps only Horton and Pangborn walked out of the pre-Code films into the dreary desert of sexless movies that began to appear in 1934 and 1935, continuing for decades after. Novarro also survived, but with an incredible metaphoric limp and real alcoholism, finally being murdered in 1968 by men who had answered his call for rent boys in a botched robbery attempt. The other pansies of the early 1930s movies were tossed to the side.

     In It’s a Boy you can actually see, even if it may have unintentional, how Horton was saved from Breen’s lowering beam. Indeed, the whole movie is centered, despite its many subplots, on the attempt to get the gentleman of the unmarrying kind married. And the viewer has good reason to imagine, given the road blocks put in his way by the bride’s father, Eustace Bogle (Alfred Drayton) and those imposed by Dudley himself that the affair will never take place.

      First of all, everyone who attends the bachelor party the night before the wedding goes home totally plastered, particularly Dudley and his best man, James Skippett (Leslie Henson). Skippett is clearly a best man in more ways than one, and in any movie earlier in the decade would have been openly presented as a kind of offstage lover—although Dudley and Skippett would also not have been central characters. Even as these men leave the party, Skippett dons the tablecloth to become the bride, linking arms with Dudley to suggest they are bride and groom.

 

     A while later the duo arrive back in Dudley’s mansion so drunk that they end up sharing a bed, one dressed in a pajama bottom with formal shirt and tie covering the top half of his body, the other in a pajama top matched with a formal pair of pants, making it clear that they shared something more than just the bed.

      The wedding is planned for 12:00, but Dudley’s butler can awaken him finally only at 11:55. As he explains to Skippett whom he discovers sleeping in his bed: “Do you realize we’re going to get married in exactly 5 minutes time,” to which Skippett replies, “What, you and me?”  

      There are other minor complications. The evening before Dudley, in a drunken confession, has admitted to his friend a discretion many years earlier. On the eve of the Great War in 1914, he was evidently attracted to a Miss Piper, and, he admits, he made “a false step” (the two drunk men falling on stairs as he reports this): he enlisted. He recalls nothing else and never saw Miss Piper again. But two years later he received a note from said Miss Piper wanting to know what he was going to do about “his responsibility.” In short, Dudley believes he may have a son, surely a detriment when one is about to be married.

       The audience, taking one look at Dudley seriously doubts the possibility that even as a young man Horton’s character could possibly have bedded Miss Piper—just as later in the movie Top Hat, Horton’s wife Madge Hardwick can hardly imagine that any other woman might take an interest in her husband, and doubts even that years earlier in Paris that he may have been infatuated by a Fifi or Kiki. But the young man, Joe Piper, just happens to show up that very next morning, claiming to be his long lost son and demanding a substantial sum of money.

 

      How could Dudley, with all that going on, and given his naturally confused and jittery sense of being ever be expected to make the wedding in time? But the Bogles, particularly the father—despite the insistence of Dudley’s fiancée Mary (Wendy Barrie) and her mother (Helen Haye) to wait just a little longer—calls off the wedding.   

     What follows, accordingly, as the groom-to-be and his fiancée finally meet up in her home, is a series of fibs involving a meeting that Skippett claims he insisted Dudley take that morning with a noted author…picking the name up for a book in the Bogle living room…John Tempest—who without any of them knowing it is actually a woman who is also a friend of Mary Bogle’s and is now part of her wedding party holed up in her house. This is, after all, a farce!     

     Bogle senior demands to meet John Tempest, and the lies pile up as Joe Piper, who shows up to blackmail his “daddy,” is forced to play Tempest, and, after it is discovered that Tempest is really a woman, required again to dress up in drag to perform as the female writer. To make sure things are even more confusing, Skippett also dresses in drag to perform as the female who goes by the pseudonym of Tempest, Mr. Bogle finding himself quite attracted to the woman scrivener.

       In short, since it is 1933, not yet 1934, and the movie is a British production, director Tom Whelan gets to turn Horton into a straight man and still film it as a gay movie at the very same moment.

       Unexpectedly, Dudley does finally take action, rushing off with his fiancée to the marriage register and proceeding with the ceremony—that is until Bogle shows up with Joe Piper ready to call the wedding off all over again. Fortunately, a theatrical deus ex machina arrives just in time in the form of a policeman who has long been on to Joe Piper and his mother’s attempts to blackmail many young soldiers over the years. Besides Joe doesn’t truly need any more money, the real father having handsomely settled with him years before—that man, so we discover, being none other that Eustace Bogle.

      I like to think of Mary Bogle being the girlish version of the later Madge Hardwick, a clever being who no longer is afraid of loosing the love of a husband who never did pay much attention to her or any women for that matter. Besides she’s busy in this version of an ongoing saga with Horton’s close male friend, Jerry Travers (Astaire in Top Hat), in trying to marry him off to her woman acquittance, Dale Tremont, who threatens to marry a real poof, a dress designer. More of that later.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Douglas Messerli | Six Short Porn Films of the 1920s [Introduction]

six short porn films of the 1920s

by Douglas Messerli

 

Although when I began collecting all the films of LGBTQ+ interest I had determined to exclude pornographic cinema, over the years I have realized that it is also an important aspect of gay, lesbian, and bisexual cinematic culture, particularly before the 1970s and 80s when pornography gradually grew into a more distinct entity, without major narrative content which focused only on the sexual. Even then there are major exceptions. And I realized, in retrospect, that to completely exclude the cinematic form would also be to distort the record and fail to even mention works that during the same period wherein most of cinema was afraid to even mention homosexuality, chose to recognize homosexual behavior by portraying it.

      This essay includes six examples of pornography from the 1920s that include LGBTQ activity. In nearly all of these, except for the earliest, Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly—which I’d argue is more interested in homosexual sex than in its heterosexual images—these works were basically produced for heterosexuals, despite the fact most of the examples of I have chosen begin with lesbian sexual activity. We all know, however, that lesbian sex is also terribly erotic to many heterosexual men, and in almost every instance in these films, once the women have begun to engage in sex, a male figure enters and their attention quickly shifts to satisfying the male needs—much the way heteronormative society demands it be even today.

      Nonetheless, in many of the films included here, there is also portrayal of gay male and lesbian sex, and in a couple of cases, the gay intercourse appears to demand more attention that the heterosexual activity. I have basically excluded heterosexual images since that is obviously not the focus of My Queer Cinema.

      The films I’ve selected are the aforenamed and the most well known of these works, Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), and the anonymous works, Atelier Faiminette (Women’s Workshop) (1921), L'abbé Bitt au couvent (Abbot Bitt at the Convent) (1925), La fessée à l’école (School Spanking) (1925), Le grand sout d’homme (Bossom Buddies) (c. 1925), and L’heure du thé (Tea Time) (1925).

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

[The descriptions and images of these films are not available on Google for fear of censorship. Google closed down my last site. If you’re interested in my quite tame commentary, please e-mail me at douglasmess30@gmail.com, and I will send the appropriate essays and accompanying images.] 

Jorge Torregrosa | Deseo (Desire) / 1999

his and her sailors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Torregrosa (screenwriter, based on a story by E. M. Forster, and director) Deseo (Desire) / 1999

 

A clearly disconsolate couple, Harry (William Short) and Julia (Anne Carney) have traveled all the way from Manhattan (“the city”) to visit Prospect Park in Brooklyn, seeking out most particularly the Obelisk.* Their site-seeing trip, in fact, seems more like an obligation than a joyful holiday.

     We do almost immediately detect, however, a slightly sweeter temperament in Julia, but she is so controlled by her gruff husband that seems equally impolite, even to two sailors, celebrating their 1-day shore leave in the manner of On the Town, seemingly actually intending to see the famed “Cleopatra’s Needle.”

      The first sailor (Daniel Kruse) asks the couple if they know the whereabouts of the Obelisk, to which Julia responds that they themselves are also tourists, but since Harry has a map perhaps they might join them. Both immediately take the opportunity and tag along. But it’s quickly apparent that the first sailor has other intentions, engaging Julia in conversation as the two eventually share a cigarette and get separated from her husband the second sailor (Bryan Close) who has continued on with Harry.       While the first sailor begins to sweet-talk Julia, commenting on her beauty, etc., the second sailor attempts to make some communication, without much success, with Harry. But finally, he is able to engage him by asking him if the two generally bring along their children on such outings. Harry admits that they don’t have children, barking out that he’s not sure he’d even like them, but eventually admitting that Julia might have liked children. The second sailor seems to break through Harry’s reserve somewhat by agreeing with Harry, “A father’s got to want his kids or else there’s no point.” They soon find other things upon which they agree.

     Meanwhile, the first sailor’s seduction of Julia continues, as he removes his blouse and convinces her that they will later “catch up.”

       By the end of the day, clearly after sex in the park, Julia and her sailor rejoin Harry and his sailor at the bus stop where they find them waiting. Harry wants to know where she was? He and the sailor had waited, he explains, at the Obelisk but they never showed up. Was she and the sailor perhaps visiting the Japanese Garden?

      Her sailor, who intercedes upon her behalf insists they waited at the Obelisk for a long while but couldn’t find Harry or his sailor friend. The second sailor, with a slight smile on his face, queries “You showed the Obelisk to the lady?” the pun being quite obvious to all involved—except perhaps for Julia.

 

     But the sailors have to be going, they’re wanted back on board, and say a sweet goodbye to our originally unhappy couple.

 

     Harry and Julia await the bus, but Julia wants to quickly stop in at the nearby gift shop. She purchase a postcard of the Obelisk, the shop girl replying that it’s too bad they moved it temporarily to an exhibition. Slowly it dawns on Julia that her husband, similar to her, has not visited the Obelisk with his sailor friend as he insisted he had, that he perhaps found a similar way of passing the day as she had.

     On the bus home, postcard in hand, she starts to say something, but pauses, realizing that any statement of recognition of the missing stature would only incriminate her as well. Or perhaps if he actually did attempt to visit the Obelisk, he already knows the truth about which neither is ready to speak. Both she and her husband have obviously found some sort of release apart from each other, and perhaps will have to face those needs or “desires” in the future as well.

      This is the kind of charming satire that characterized so much of gay filmmaking in the last decades of the 20th century, although IMDb insists on declaring this 1999-made film as a product of 2000, the year of its Netherlands debut. Other sources claim it for 1999, a decision with which I concur.

      Born in Spain, the director of Desire Jorge Torregrosa lived in New York City for 10 years, during that time attending the Tisch School of Film at New York University and making 4 short films, Family Pictures (1998), Salo Me Pa Mela Me (1998), Desire (1999), and Women in a Train (2001). Upon his return to Spain he made several further short films, worked in music videos for artists Antonio Orozco and Najwa Mimri, and filmed commercial advertisements. In 2012 he debuted his first feature film Fin.

 

*In fact, the Obelisk, a gift from the Khedive of Egypt, Isma'il Pasha was shipped to the US in 1880 via the SS Dessoug and erected in Central Park in Manhattan behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was never located in Brooklyn. But the sculpture’s location was kept secret by those involved, including Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, William henry Hulbert, and Frederic Edwin Church, according to Gorringe, “In order to avoid needless discussion of the subject.” It was decided “to maintain the strictest secrecy as to the location determined on,” placing it behind a knoll on which it was firmly anchored into bedrock.

     For years its famed hieroglyphs remained clear, but by the late 20th century, acid rain and begun to pit the sculpture and the hieroglyphs were endangered. In 2010, Dr. Zahi Hawass sent an open letter to the president of the Central Park Conservancy and the Mayor of New York City insisting on improved conservation efforts. If they were not able to properly care for the obelisk, he threatened to "take the necessary steps to bring this precious artifact home and save it from ruin"

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Yasujirō Ozu | 早春 (Sōshun) Early Spring / 1956

going hungry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 早春 (Sōshun) (Early Spring) / 1956

Yasujirō Ozu’s longest film to survive, Early Spring, might almost be described as a melodrama, a bit in the manner of the works of American directors Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk—except while the American films were generally about women who were unfaithful and doubting, in Ozu’s great film it is the husband, Shoji Sugiyama (Ryō Ikebe) who cheats on his wife, Masako (Chikage Awashima).  

     Working in an office that is just as impersonal, although far more crowded, as Billy Wilder’s terrifying vistas in The Apartment, Sugiyama is unhappy in his daily routine, which Ozu indicates from the very first scene of his film with the sound of his alarm clock as his character’s trudge, along with hundreds of other workers, to central Tokyo, where they are locked into small rooms for accounting, typing, and fact-checking, with an occasional invite out by the higher-ups.

      The best such a common worker can hope for is to gradually move up in the corporate structure over many years, but like his fellow worker who dies during the movie, Sugiyama has little hope for advancement. For reasons unknown, his and Masako’s only son has died—one suspects of lack of nutrition, since the family sometimes cannot even afford their daily intake of rice. Masako is sometimes forced to take advantage of her tart-speaking mother, who runs a local restaurant-bar, in order to simply bring enough food to their table.

      Throughout this film, in fact, Sugiyama often goes hungry, his lunch being interrupted by officials, his dinners replaced by drunken nights with his friends with whom he plays mahjong. He is a man who hungers; so is it any wonder when, invited by a wide-eyed office typist, Chiyo Kaneko (Keiko Kishi), nicknamed because of her large eyes, “Goldfish,” that he is quite literally seduced into joining the office hikers (a thematic in several Japanese films), and even further implicated into her life after she suggests they take the slackers way by catching a hitch on the back of a local truck passing by. Indeed, their fellow would-be hikers are envious of their decision, begging that they too might join them.

 

      Ozu subtly makes this simple act into a kind of transgression, as the two ride past their fellow workers in complete enjoyment of their “rest,” while the others must slowly slog on. You can almost hear the gossip that follows roiling up among their fellow employees. And soon after even Masako suspects that something is going on with her husband, while his friends determine to celebrate a rice party wherein, since Sugiyama never shows up, they castigate Kaneko for beginning an affair with their married friend.

      The bleakness of Sugiyama’s life gets even darker when Masako leaves their home to return to her mother, admitting that she has discovered a lipstick-stained handkerchief in his husband’s pocket, while the confused worker is asked to relocate to a provincial city where the company has interests—a move which might be seen either as a demotion or a possibility of new potential—which, obviously, will also take him away from his only current pleasure.

      Ozu, himself, argued that he was attempting "to portray what you might call the pathos of the white-collar life,” while still making it quite clear that Masako, nonetheless, is a good and quite faithful wife. What makes the Japanese director’s work so very different from any Hollywood melodrama is that these humans, who have made grave mistakes, can return to one another and forgive, that their love is somehow deeper than their desperations.

      We can never know whether Sugiyama and his wife’s lives will improve—Ozu never allows simple summaries of his explorations of deep family life—but we can hope that this unhappy couple may somehow again find their way through life. Ozu’s vision, with regard to the vicissitudes of post-World War II Japanese family life, is still committed to the unions into which his characters pledged themselves. If they fail, it is also a product of the culture at large, not simply their personal inabilities. One might even argue that for Ozu, family life is the only way to survive such tragic circumstances. Alone, one can find no true solution for survival.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Douglas Messerli | A Welcoming Embrace: Three Movies of Cheryl Dunye of the 1990s / 2024 [Introduction]

a welcoming embrace: three movies by cheryl dunye of the 1990s

by Douglas Messerli

 

There is something terribly comforting about watching black lesbian director Cheryl Dunye’s films. It is almost as if she greets her viewers at the gate of her own being, like it were a house into which you are immediately invited.

 

    I am not suggesting that she simplifies or sanitizes the issues of sexuality which these films discuss; but, particularly for those who might be a bit frightened about lesbianism, not to say the racial concerns her work sometimes calls up, Dunye simply prepares the viewer for what the film is about to show us and the implications of what her work means ahead of time. A bit like the playwright María Irene Fornés, particularly in Fefu and Her Friends, Dunye not only directly introduces many of her films, but invites the audience into the various rooms of her house, the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and sometimes even the bathroom, where we get various perspectives of the action which her actors have already outlined, often sharing with us how they see the characters they are about to perform. Even my unknowingly racist mother, fearful of alternative sexualities, might basically have felt comfortable in watching Dunye’s seemingly amateur videos.

     This approach is particularly apparent in her films of the early 1990s, which I have gathered here for a brief discussion of each: Janine (1990), She Don’t Fade (1991), and Potluck and the Passion (1993).

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

Cheryl Dunye | Potluck and the Passion / 1993

ending and beginning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Branch and Cheryl Dunye (screenplay), Cheryl Dunye (director) Potluck and the Passion / 1993

 

     Dunye’s 1993 short film, The Potluck and the Passion, is truly closer to playwright I María Irene Fornés’ work. To celebrate their 1st year together, Dunye and her friends decide to invite a select group of each of their best friends, most unknown to one another.

     The funniest pair of these luncheon guests are a lesbian couple living in New York who travel down to the couple’s home without having the proper direction, losing their way, predictably, several times while attempting to buy their contributions to the potluck in convenience stores along the way. Eventually they eat most of the food when they again become lost and fear they’ll never arrive in time to be fed.

     They arrive after nearly everyone has dined and made friends with one another except for a white Janine-like woman who has brought along a black lesbian woman she has just met, and who responds to her friend’s sexual interest in another invitee by storming out of the event at the very moment the stragglers finally enter.

      But it might be more appropriate to describe the white woman’s departure and the straggler’s arrival as the beginning rather than an ending, since the girl the white woman has left behind not only discovers that she has a great deal in common with another interloper, who has cooked up a delicious spicy chicken dish, but so enjoys the entree that she insists she must watch the other prepare a new batch. In fact, we might argue, the potluck is only the beginning as it leads into a night of new relationships, deeper friendships, and even the passions these women have quickly developed by simply being brought into the hot-house atmosphere of Dunye’s and her lover’s welcoming embrace.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

Cheryl Dunye | She Don’t Fade / 1991

the second time around

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (director) She Don’t Fade / 1991

 

 

 

      Cheryl Dunye’s 1991 film, She Don’t Fade hints of what the more exciting, complex, and richer life she hints at in her 1990 film, Janine, might entail. Dunye plays a character named Shae Clarke, a 29-year-old who explains her role in the plot, such as it is, of this brief presentation of the vagaries of love, allowing, as she will also in other works, the other actors to also explain their characters to the audience. The self-declared “dyke yenta” friend of Shae’s, Zoie Strauss, however, gives the first abbreviated lowdown of the story “about the wild world of lesbianism” where Shae first meets one woman with whom she develops a nice relationship. The video camera, very much presenting this as a cinematic event, even shows the two having a kind of lifeless sex in bed—which Zoie has described as “getting down and dirty.” In fact, there is absolutely nothing “dirty” about the artful presentation of two woman having sex as the cinematographer maneuvers them into position. Everything in Shae’s life, including her new job as a street vendor and the woman whom she has just met seems to be going extremely well.

      That is, until taking a stairs to a pedestrian bridge to her own apartment she meets another woman going down and falls desperately in love. Without even knowing who the stranger is, Shae breaks up with the first woman, desperately seeking out the other woman whose path she has just accidentally crossed.

      At a party attended by both her lesbian and gay male friends, Zoie suddenly points out a woman across the room and both Shae and the woman she has seen on the stairs are quickly swept up into a relationship which looks to be more long-lasting than the previous one, particularly since their unbridled sex scene is far steamier than the earlier “staged” coupling.

      It is, as Zoie has told us from start, familiar territory even in Hollywood films: someone falling in love only to quickly find someone else who she loves far more intensely; isn’t that, after all, the story of the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr film, An Affair to Remember? So Dunye seems to ask, what’s the big deal if its two women instead of a gay man and a woman who played basically prim and proper women (twice as a nun)? Haven’t we now just entered through a back door into a far tamer version of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures?

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).